Narratology and Theory of Fiction: Remarks on a Complex Relationship

a contradiction between the pretense and the practice of narratological research I. Instead of studying all kind of narratives, for Genette, narratological research concentrates de facta on the techniques of fictional narrative.Correspondingly, Genette speaks of a "fictional narratology,,2 in the pejorative sense of a discipline that sets arbitrary limits on its area of study.In his objection, the narratology that literary scholars practice considers fictional narrative to be at least the standard case of any narrative 3• In other words, what is merely a special case, within a wide field of narratives, is here elevated to narrative par excellence 4• According to Genette, narratology 1 Cf.Genette (1993: 54).2 "Or, quels que soient, au stade oil nous sommes, les mcrites et les defauts de la narratologie fictionnelle [ ... ]," Genette (1991: 66); the expression "narratologie fictionnelle," unfortunately, is not preserved in the English translation: "Now, whatever strengths and weaknesses narratology may have in its current state [ ... ]," Genette (1993: 53). 3 Cf.Genette (1993: 54f.). 4 Except for the late Gerard Genette, Dietrich Weber is one of the few narratologists to emerge from Iiterary studies who explicitly argues against an exclusion of nonfictional narratives from narrative theory.He takes literary narratives in general, fictional as weil as non-fictional ("künstlerische Erzählliteratur, mag sie nun fiktional sein oder nicht"), to be the subject matter of Iiterary narrative theory: Weber (1998: 7f.).A similar position can be found in Lamping (2000), particularly 217-19.However, a problematic identification offictional and non-fictional narrative-as we will show--is